AstroTalk: Behind the news headlines of January 2018

Transcription

1 AstroTalk: Behind the news headlines of January 2018 Richard de Grijs ( 何锐思 ) (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) Stellar refugees on galactic scales just blame gravity! Where do the stars in our Milky Way galaxy come from? All stars we see in the night sky belong to our Milky Way, and while most stars were likely born in the Milky Way, many appear to have originated in other galaxies and migrated to our shores. Tell-tale evidence comes from streams of stars created when small galaxies interact with the Milky Way. The first week of January is traditionally the time when the American Astronomical Society holds its annual winter meeting and this is also the time when many of its scientists issue press releases announcing their latest results. This year, I was struck by an interesting press release about the discovery of 11 new stellar streams in observations from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Our own Galaxy is thought to have been enriched by stars from other galaxies in discrete migration events. When a small neighbouring galaxy ventures close to the Milky Way, the Milky Way s gravitational pull draws out tendrils of stars from the neighbouring galaxy, which trail behind it in a stream. Many such interactions are thought to have contributed stars to the halo of the Milky Way. In fact, stellar streams could be the remnants of either dwarf galaxies or globular clusters that once orbited a galaxy but have been disrupted and stretched out along their orbits by tidal forces of their hosts. Prior to the discovery of the 11 new stellar streams in the Milky Way s halo, only two dozen or so stellar streams were known, many of which were discovered in data from a precursor survey, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). DES data have been previously used to discover numerous dwarf galaxy neighbours of the Milky Way; I wrote about those discoveries in my May 2015 AstroTalk contribution. While finding dwarf galaxies is a challenging endeavour they are faint and diffuse stellar streams are even more difficult to pick out, because their stars are spread out over a much larger area of sky. These discoveries are possible because the Dark Energy Survey is the widest, deepest, and best-calibrated survey out there, explained Alex Drlica-Wagner (Fermilab), a member of the DES team. Data from the first three years of the survey, which is currently being carried out with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4 metre Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, were also made publicly available in conjunction with the announcement. Although DES was carried out primarily to understand the nature of dark energy,

2 The great thing about a big astronomical survey like this is that it also opens a door to many other discoveries, like the new stellar streams, explained Adam Bolton from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO). With the DES data now available as a digital sky accessible to all, our hope is that the data will lead to the crowdsourcing of new and unexpected discoveries. Indeed, the DES data have already enabled diverse science, ranging from studies of Near-Earth Orbiting objects to distant quasars formed not long after the Big Bang, added Alistair Walker (NOAO), a member of the DES team and the DECam Instrument Scientist. The public release of the DES data continues a trend towards ever larger data sets in astronomy. The DES data release includes measurements of 400 million stars and galaxies, about twice the number of objects in the SDSS, the premier survey of the last decade, explained Knut Olsen, the team leader of NOAO s Data Lab. The survey data extend deep and wide, to stars 40 million times fainter than the human eye can see, covering 1/8 of the entire sky. In the same way that DES is a successor to the SDSS, The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), currently under construction on Cerro Pachon in Chile, is the next generation sky survey after DES, says Bolton. In the 2020s, LSST will deliver a yet wider and deeper view of the Universe from distant galaxies, to our Milky Way, down to the Solar System and not just as a still photo, but as a high-definition movie that will capture the rich variability of the sky. LSST is expected to catalogue some 18 billion objects in its first year of operation alone, dwarfing the number of objects in both the DES and SDSS catalogues. This result is an excellent example of how 'data mining' the exploration of large data sets leads to new discoveries, exclaimed Richard Green, Director of the US National Science Foundation s Division of Astronomical Sciences. We re expecting a drumbeat of exciting discoveries, particularly when the LSST data floodgates are opened! Bolton views the DES data release as a fantastic opportunity to prepare for this Big Data era. It s a great way for all of us to exercise the new modes of investigation and analysis that will be essential in the LSST era, while also sharpening our understanding of the open questions in astrophysics and cosmology that LSST is being built to address. Despite the high-profile publicity for their 11 newly discovered stellar streams, such discoveries have recently become more numerous than in the past. In November last year, an international team of astronomers detected yet another new thin stellar stream in the halo of the Milky Way. That newly discovered

3 feature, which the researchers called the jet stream, could help astronomers answer fundamental questions about the mass distribution of the Milky Way s dark matter halo. Astronomers are interested in finding new stellar streams in the Milky Way, because they hope that such features could answer some crucial questions about the galaxy. For instance, stellar streams could help us understand the largescale mass distribution of the galactic dark matter halo. Moreover, they could confirm whether or not our Galaxy contains low-mass dark matter subhalos. Last November, a group of researchers led by Prashin Jethwa of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) found a new stellar stream in the Milky Way using the Search for the Leading Arm of Magellanic Satellites (SLAMS) optical survey. SLAMS also uses the Blanco telescope at CTIO and is used to look for satellites of the Magellanic Clouds. However, the observations conducted by Jethwa s team accidentally revealed the presence of a new stellar stream in the Milky Way s halo. We recently carried out a mini survey which led to the fortuitous discovery of a thin stellar stream in the outer halo, which we name the jet stream, the researchers wrote. The jet stream is located about 95,000 light years from the Earth and crosses the constellations of Hydra and Pyxis. The researchers estimate that the stream has a width of approximately 293 light years, which morphologically places it in the category of thin stellar streams, along with streams known as Pal 5, GD-1, and ATLAS. The scientists suggest that such thinness could indicate that a globular cluster was a progenitor of this stream. The research also revealed that the jet stream has a mass of about 25,000 solar masses, which makes it one of the least massive stellar streams known to date. Moreover, they found that the jet stream consists of mainly metal-poor stars (stars formed when the Milky Way galaxy was young and its gas content was still pretty pristine, mostly composed of hydrogen and helium), and its age was calculated to be about 12.5 billion years. Although fundamental parameters of the jet stream were determined by Jethwa s team, still more studies are necessary to further characterise it and confirm its origin. Additional imaging is planned to attempt to trace the stream beyond the current survey footprint, followed by a spectroscopic campaign to determine radial velocities, metallicities, and detailed abundances, shedding light on the nature and orbital history of the progenitor. Finally, deeper, uniform imaging along the stream track will be required to robustly detect density perturbations caused by possible subhalo encounters, the astronomers concluded in their paper.

4 However, the SLAMS project was really designed to study streams associated with the Magellanic Clouds, two of the nearest sizeable galaxies to our Milky Way. Although they are significantly less massive than the Milky Way, their gravitational pull can also lead to the stretching out of unsuspecting star clusters and tiny dwarf galaxies. Indeed, a few years ago, astronomers from the University of Cambridge (UK) detected a number of narrow streams and diffuse debris clouds around the Magellanic Clouds. Even though a prominent gaseous stream emanating from the clouds has been known and studied for some time, no obvious stellar streams had been found until recently, said Vasily Belokurov, one of the researchers, at that time. Belokurov, together with his colleague Sergey Koposov, also used the DES to track down stellar debris on the outskirts of the Magellanic Clouds. They were searching for the Magellanic stellar halo substructure using blue horizontalbranch (BHB) stars as tracers. BHBs are old and metal-poor stars powered by helium fusion that appear blue. They were targeted, since these stars suffer little contamination from other stellar populations. BHBs can be easily picked up and are one of the best stellar standard rulers available. Thanks to their unique properties, BHBs have proven to be a powerful tool to scrutinise the galactic halo out from the core to its far-flung fringes, the researchers wrote. In the halo, not only can these old and metal-poor stars be easily identified above the foreground of other populations thanks to their peculiar colour, they are also one of the best stellar distance estimators available, they added. To study the stellar halo substructure around the Magellanic Clouds, we use the photometric catalogues obtained from the publicly released DES Year 1 imaging, in particular, the latest improved version of the reduction, their paper reads. Scanning many BHBs, the astronomers detected the stellar halo of the Magellanic system and its substructures. Each of these substructures is different in shape, extent and luminosity, and deserves its own detailed analysis. The discovery of these stellar halo substructures led the scientists to ponder on the possible revision of our current knowledge about Large Magellanic Cloud s (LMC) mass. They ask whether the LMC could, in fact, be much more massive than has been previously assumed. Our discoveries imply that the Large Magellanic Cloud might have been a lot more massive than we previously thought. To figure out exactly how

5 much more massive, we need to follow these streams up with spectroscopy in order to measure their velocities, Belokurov said. The researchers also noted that a combination of the deep imaging and spectroscopic follow-up of the tidal debris could provide more information about the orbital history of the Magellanic Clouds. This could be crucial to our understanding of the Clouds future as they are in the process of merging with our Milky Way. They are currently on their way to join the already crowded Milky Way halo. The technique used by Belokurov and his team is well established. It was used by Polish astronomers from the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) to discover a young stellar bridge, which forms a continuous connection between the Magellanic Clouds. Their finding was based on number density maps for stellar populations found in data gathered by OGLE. We find that the young population is present mainly in the western half of the Magellanic Bridge area (MBR), which, together with the newly discovered young population in the eastern Bridge, form a continuous stream of stars connecting both galaxies along, the researchers concluded. The young population distribution is clumped, with one of the major densities close to the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC), and the other, fairly isolated and located approximately midway between the Clouds, which we call the OGLE island. In the paper, OGLE scientists presented density maps of stellar populations in the entire Magellanic Bridge region. The maps showed, for the first time, the detailed extent of these populations, which should provide valuable input information for models of past Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds interactions. This unique dataset allowed us to construct detailed number density maps for three key stellar populations: the young stars, and the intermediate-age and old populations, represented by the red clump and the red giant branch stars. The density map confirms that the majority of young stars are found in the western part of the classical Bridge, but what is more important, it shows that the young population is also present in the eastern part of the classical Bridge region, which was not observed before. This means that there is a continuous stream of young stars connecting the two galaxies, the team concluded. This area of research is clearly heating up. The coming online of LSST in a few years time will have a major impact on our detailed understanding of the history of the Milky Way galaxy s halo and its interactions with the Magellanic Clouds indeed exciting prospects await the patient scientist!

6 Figure 1: Colour image of the Dark Energy Survey field. Several of the streams are visible as yellow streaks. (Credit: Alex Drlica-Wagner (Fermilab), Nora Shipp (U. Chicago), and the DES Collaboration) Figure 2: Many streams are apparent in the Milky Way halo. (Credit: Alex Drlica-Wagner (Fermilab), Nora Shipp (U. Chicago), and the DES Collaboration)

7 Figure 3: Trend towards ever larger data sets in astronomy. Since the work of Annie Jump Cannon and others in creating the Henry Draper Catalog of 200,00 stars, astronomical catalogues have grown steadily in size. The DES catalogues 400 million objects, roughly double that of the SDSS, the premier survey of the past decade. The LSST will soon detect billions of objects, dwarfing both surveys. (Credit: J. Najita, M. Newhouse & NOAO/AURA/NSF)

8 Figure 4: False-colour map of the density of stars from the SLAMS survey. The dotted line shows the future orbit of the LMC, which is roughly aligned with the orientation of the Jet stream. The green/blue colour gradient along the southern edge is due to the varying distance distribution of Milky Way disk stars. (Credit: Jethwa et al. 2017) Figure 5

9 Figure 6: Map of stars in the outer regions of the Milky Way, derived from the SDSS images of the northern sky. The colour indicates the distance of the stars, while the intensity indicates the density of stars on the sky. Structures visible in this map include streams of stars torn from the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, a smaller orphan stream crossing the Sagittarius streams, the Monoceros Ring that encircles the Milky Way disk, trails of stars being stripped from the globular cluster Palomar 5, and excesses of stars found towards the constellations Virgo and Hercules. Circles enclose new Milky Way companions discovered by the SDSS; two of these are faint globular star clusters, while the others are faint dwarf galaxies. (Credit: V. Belokurov and the Sloan Digital Sky Survey)